Science Week

Challenge

Science Week is Science Foundation Ireland’s (SFI) flagship public engagement event. SFI aims to have Ireland’s most scientifically engaged audiences and in 2018, our objective was to engage with young adults aged 18 – 35 – a core audience segment that had proven difficult with resonate with in previous years.

Approach

We developed a fresh, digital-focused approach to capture the attention of our target audience and encourage more active participation in Science Week.

We developed a social media campaign called ‘Stop and Ask’.

The campaign challenged the audience to become part of the story – another key factor for our target audience.

We worked with multiple media organisations to host #StopAndAsk activity on their social platforms throughout the week. This included Facebook live interviews and questions being answered on Instagram Stories throughout the week.

We worked with a panel of experts and academics to field and responded to questions the public had about the world around them.

‘Stop And Ask’ resonated for traditional media coverage with cut through in national and regional media throughout the Week.

Result

Widespread media coverage was secured across all mediums and the #StopAndAsk digital campaign drove a new level of engagement with the target audience viewing, sharing and engaging with the #StopAndAsk content.

The 2018 #StopAndAsk Science Week campaign achieved:

Almost 6,000 social mentions.

Over 2,700 unique authors engaged with SFI / Science Week.

Over 73 million Twitter impressions.

Reached more than 260k people through four #StopAndAsk media partnerships.